[Mailman-Developers] Hi! I'll be your intern for the summer :)

[Terri Oda]

Oh, goodness, Ethan... I was excited when Barry told me we were getting 
a SoC student to do this, and you sound *exactly* what we need.  I'll 
try to restrain myself from declaring everlasting love until I've seen 
some finished work, but I will say that I'm very happy to have you on 
the project.  (Even if I'll probably have to rewrite all the docs once 
you're done... ;)  )

1. Integration with look/feel of people's existing websites

As others have said, the biggest question I get from people is usually 
along the lines of "How can I make Mailman fit in to the rest of my 
website?"   Some of the, you aren't going to have much control over 
(Top of list: why can't we just have users with one password for 
mailman and everything else?) but things like making the interface all 
css friendly (is the plan for it to be all xhtml-compliant?) and 
providing configurable headers and footers will make a pretty huge 
difference right there.

2. Simplified (possibly customizable?) interface as an option

I'd also like to see it possible to make a page that contains a 
simplified version of the interface.  I, as a geek, love having a 
billion settings to mess with, but lots of list managers aren't so 
inclined, and it'd be nice to give them just a simple (customizable) 
set of functions so they don't throw up their hands and decide that 
mailman is too scary.  This could probably be done if the xhtml gives 
us control over each item to be displayed, and different people could 
use different templates with the options they don't want/need turned 
off.  I can imagine even terribly technical users might like to have a 
mailman admin page which just contains the things they use most often 
so they don't have to delve into the entire interface all the time.

This might, incidentally, help a lot with the 
completeness-versus-simplicity problem that is inherent in all 
interfaces.   It might also make my job as a documenter hellishly 
difficult when people start emailing me and saying "but I don't have 
that option!" but I can deal with that. ;)

3. Organization

I dislike the way the list admin interface is currently organized.  
People are forever looking for things in the wrong places, which is 
probably a sign that the things are in the wrong places and we should 
maybe move them. :)   I wish I had time to figure out what these places 
are and tell you, but if you start finding the same thing, or you get 
people testing your designs and going to the wrong spot, make note, 
please?

4. Wishful thinking....

I don't suppose you'll have time to make some of the options less 
utterly confusing?  For example, I've yet to have anyone guess what an 
umbrella list was and what it's for unless they were already familiar 
with mailing lists...

5. Archives?

Are you going to get a chance to touch the archives?  A lot of the same 
things apply for templating there, and people always want that same 
look/feel.

Of course, I really really want to replace pipermail with something a 
bit more modern (I'm looking at finding a nice way to use apache's 
mbox_mod for my current lists -- if anyone's got instructions for that, 
drop me a line!), but I think that's a little outside your scope. :)  
Still, getting  it so the archives at least use the same CSS might be 
nice.

---

I'll probably think of a dozen more things to say later, but as 
everyone else seems to have covered the most important things I'll try 
to restrain myself a bit. :)  I'm very excited to see this happen, 
though -- I think the web interface is often heralded as one of 
Mailman's strengths, and it'll be nice to see it a bit more polished 
and modern and less like someone's opened up a dusty panel and let us 
grab all the live wires we want. :)

  Terri